1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a plasma display panel (PDP), and more particularly to a method and apparatus to automatically control power of address data in a plasma display panel (PDP), and a PDP including the apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, PDPs require an apparatus to control power consumption in accordance with the load ratio of a frame to be displayed, because they consume a large amount of electric power due to driving characteristics thereof. Conventionally, such a power control is automatically carried out to reduce power consumption. In conventional cases, however, such an auto power control is carried out only for generation of sustain and scan pulses. That is, no auto power control is carried out for generation of address data. For this reason, conventional PDPs have a drawback of large power consumption in their PDP parts to drive address data.
Image data of a white-screen is shown in the following. It can be seen that all pixels in the image data of the white-screen have a value of 1. In this case, accordingly, there is little or no data variation of address electrodes. Also, the number of pulse switching operations is small. Thus, reactive power generated during a charging or discharging operation is reduced because power consumption increases in proportion to the number of switching operations. According to the driving waveform for the image data of the white-screen, only one switching operation is required for each column of the image data of the white-screen.
On the other hand, image data may have a dot pattern. It can be seen that the dot pattern image data has pixel values continuously varying between 1 and 0, so that it requires a number of switching operations. According to the driving waveform in this case, in the case of the dot pattern image data, there is a considerable data variation of address electrodes. Also, the pulse switching of the driving waveform is frequently made, thereby causing an increase in power consumption.
The switching operation is more frequently generated when the number of pixels having different values between the current and previous lines of address data is larger. In this case, there is a problem of an increase in power consumption.